Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a very interesting play. Written by Eugene O’Neill and loosely based on his own life, it follows a day in the life of the Tyrone family, and all the arguments and misfortune that befall them. The play lends itself to a more serious and dramatic tone than the kind I usually go to see or have seen before on this trip (for reference, I saw Back to the Future: The Musical the night before seeing this show), so it was an interesting change of pace for me, and I was very intrigued going into the show. Many of the people on the trip I had talked to said that this show was the one they were looking forward to the most. The show also starred famous and talented actors like Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson. And even though I still had a few worries going into this show, other shows on this trip like London Tide shocked me with how much I enjoyed them, so overall I was going into this show with some mild expectations. I thought that maybe the script and story would not exactly be my thing, but overall it would still be a very good show.
This show was not another London Tide for me.
To start things off, the performances from each of the actors were amazing. Everyone made good choices that I felt fit the characters well. The lines were read very clearly, and the accents were equally as clear and understandable (especially since they were doing American accents). I found a couple of the choices made by Patricia Clarkson and Daryl McCormack to be a bit out of place at the beginning of the show, but they worked a lot better later on and helped to show the descents of those characters throughout the day. I really enjoyed Laurie Kynaston’s performance, thinking that he gave Edmund a lot of emotion and depth as he changes throughout the show. Louisa Harland did very well, and left a very good impression, with her parts being some of my favorites throughout the play, even if they were relatively short compared to the stage time of everyone else. Overall, The acting and performances given in the show were all incredibly well done.
The design for the show, however, made the show truly feel like a long journey into night, and not in a good way. The set design for the show is somewhat bare and bland, which, while fitting to the idea of the show where the father is particularly frugal and does not care for the place much anyway so he does not put much money into the decoration of it leading to it looking bare and abandoned, comes off almost lazy, as the script provides a very detailed description of what the set and the house should look like. The set design feels more like it is driven by necessity rather than creative and thematic choice, which makes the show’s set boring to look at.
The lighting did not help much with this sparse set either. The lighting cues throughout the show were inconsistent, occasionally inaccurate to how the light would work, and sometimes left noticeable dark spots onstage that impeded my view of the action. It particularly annoyed me in the latter half of the show, where the characters would continuously turn different lights on and off, and the amount of light given off by even the same light source would be completely different than it was before it was turned off then back on again. The lighting from outside at the top of the latter half that shines through the window, with the way that it changes from afternoon to sunset to evening, almost seemed like it showed the fog retreating, which went against what the script and the characters were saying.
Another element that continued the muddled, strange design choice trend was the sound design. The sound design for this show on paper is not the most interesting, as it would only realistically include some foghorn sounds and a piano. However, the sound designer added other sounds on top of these two sounds, which could have worked, but the execution did not feel natural or really fit with the scenes. The foghorn sound was strange to listen to, as it had a weird wind-chime echo that played after the actual foghorn would go off, which lasted very long and drew me out a bit when it was played, which was many times throughout the show. There was also a weird angelic choir that would sing out during certain, more religious monologues and scenes of the show, which not only sounded out of place when you heard it, but actively drew attention away from the very important scene happening onstage.
The direction of the show as a whole felt very mismatched and strange, with design elements that hit you over the head with the meaning to where the meaning was lost, and blocking that felt strange and somewhat unpolished. In particular, there was one slap during the second half of the show where the actors were a noticeable distance away from each other and no noise was created, making the entire motion obviously fake. Now, it may have looked better from the ground rather than the Grand Circle where we were, however it is the director’s job to make sure that it looks believable from any angle that any audience member could be sitting at, so to ignore the view of the Grand Circle is an underperformance of their part in the process.
Overall, while the performances and story are fantastic, the design and directorial decisions of the show dragged it down, making it feel much longer than the three hours it already was.
Theatre in London U of A 